A Novel Unsupervised MRI Synthetic CT Image Generation Framework with Registration Network

In recent years,radiotherapy based only on Magnetic Resonance(MR)images has become a hot spot for radiotherapy planning research in the current medical field.However,functional computed tomography(CT)is still needed for dose calculation in the clinic.Recent deep-learning approaches to synthesized CT images from MR images have raised much research interest,making radiotherapy based only on MR images possible.In this paper,we proposed a novel unsupervised image synthesis framework with registration networks.This paper aims to enforce the constraints between the reconstructed image and the input image by registering the reconstructed image with the input image and registering the cycle-consistent image with the input image.Furthermore,this paper added ConvNeXt blocks to the network and used large kernel convolutional layers to improve the network’s ability to extract features.This research used the collected head and neck data of 180 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma to experiment and evaluate the training model with four evaluation metrics.At the same time,this research made a quantitative comparison of several commonly used model frameworks.We evaluate the model performance in four evaluation metrics which achieve Mean Absolute Error(MAE),Root Mean Square Error(RMSE),Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR),and Structural Similarity(SSIM)are 18.55±1.44,86.91±4.31,33.45±0.74 and 0.960±0.005,respectively.Compared with other methods,MAE decreased by 2.17,RMSE decreased by 7.82,PSNR increased by 0.76,and SSIM increased by 0.011.The results show that the model proposed in this paper outperforms other methods in the quality of image synthesis.The work in this paper is of guiding significance to the study of MR-only radiotherapy planning.

Meta-Learning Multi-Scale Radiology Medical Image Super-Resolution

High-resolution medical images have important medical value,but are difficult to obtain directly.Limited by hardware equipment and patient’s physical condition,the resolution of directly acquired medical images is often not high.Therefore,many researchers have thought of using super-resolution algorithms for secondary processing to obtain high-resolution medical images.However,current super-resolution algorithms only work on a single scale,and multiple networks need to be trained when super-resolution images of different scales are needed.This definitely raises the cost of acquiring high-resolution medical images.Thus,we propose a multi-scale superresolution algorithm using meta-learning.The algorithm combines a metalearning approach with an enhanced depth of residual super-resolution network to design a meta-upscale module.The meta-upscale module utilizes the weight prediction property of meta-learning and is able to perform the super-resolution task of medical images at any scale.Meanwhile,we design a non-integer mapping relation for super-resolution,which allows the network to be trained under non-integer magnification requirements.Compared to the state-of-the-art single-image super-resolution algorithm on computed tomography images of the pelvic region.The meta-learning multiscale superresolution algorithm obtained a surpassing of about 2%at a smaller model volume.Testing on different parts proves the high generalizability of our algorithm.Multi-scale super-resolution algorithms using meta-learning can compensate for hardware device defects and reduce secondary harm to patients while obtaining high-resolution medical images.It can be of great use in imaging related fields.